1636: The Viennese Waltz

CHAPTER 5

Late July 1634

On the Street outside the Fortney Property

“Do you have everything?” Judy Wendell heard at the Sanderlin lot where everyone was gathering to leave. The Sanderlins had a lot with two mobile homes on it, a single-wide for Ron, Gayleen and the kids, and a small trailer for Uncle Bob Sanderlin. One of the reasons they had taken the job was that it was getting harder and harder for them to make the rent on the lot. Besides, with one toddler and an infant, life was really hard on Gayleen, with the gradual loss of up-time labor-savers. Repairing things like washing machines and buying baby clothes. . well, Judy could understand how it could get hard.

That wasn’t why Hayley’s dad had taken the job, though, and Judy couldn’t figure out why he would. Sonny Fortney made pretty good money, even if he did bounce from job to job like a pingpong ball. Hayley wouldn’t talk about it, except to say that her dad had his reasons. Judy didn’t think she approved of this move, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Except to make sure that Hayley had someplace to call if she got in trouble and enough money to make sure she could afford to run. In support of that, Judy and the rest of the Barbies had put together a packet of mad money for Hayley, twenty thousand American dollars in cash, hidden in a false bottom of Hayley’s steamer trunk. Steamer trunks came back into fashion again, after the Ring of Fire. The Barbies owned one of the companies that made them.

“I think so,” Sonny Fortney was saying to the Ken Doll. “We have the maps and the extra surveying gear in the trailer. Plus a load of trade goods so that we will have the glass beads to buy Manhattan.”

“Ahh,” sighed Prince Karl. “I have exposed my poor countrymen to the shifty up-timers. Good Lord, forgive me for my sins.”

“Why, Prince Karl,” Judy interrupted. Then she batted her eyes twice, tilted her head, and said, “You think we have taken advantage of you?”

“I’m going to go get Sarah to protect me.”

“Good idea,” said Judy the Elder Wendell. “Judy, behave yourself. You have our address, Gayleen. If you need anything, write us and we’ll send it off by mule train.”

“Thank you, though the idea of getting stuff by mule train still freaks me out a bit,” Gayleen said.

“Me too,” Dana Fortney said. “Especially diapers. Praise be for the tubal!”

“I don’t know about that. It’s a lot of trouble but the truth is I like having babies,” Gayleen said. “On the other hand, I’m getting close to forty, so maybe just one more.”

Which, Judy the Younger thought, bordered on clinical insanity. Judy looked around. It was quite a procession. There was the pickup truck owned by Bob Sanderlin, pulling a trailer that had the 240Z on it. It was followed by the Fortney’s 1994 Subaru Outback, also pulling a trailer, this time with their household goods. They would travel south toward Bamberg, then on past it to the Danube, where they would load the cars on barges for the trip down the river to Vienna. There were also several wagons, filled with both personal possessions, items Prince Karl was sending to his family, and almost anything else the travelers could think of. As well, their escort had a couple of wagons.

Istvan said, “We’re burning daylight, people.”

Everyone turned to look at him.

“Well,” he defended himself, “it’s a good line. Very descriptive of the situation.”

“Maybe,” Judy muttered, “but you don’t look a thing like John Wayne.” By virtue of the fact that only a limited number of movies had been brought back in the Ring of Fire, all of them had been seen on TV-most of them several times.

People started loading into the cars and wagons, and climbing onto horseback. It took another half hour before they actually got on the road. . and between the horses and the wagons, they were moving at less than four miles an hour.

Wendell Household, Magdeburg

Dear Sarah,

It was nice to see you when you came to see the Fortneys off last week. I thought you looked lovely in the blue paisley you were wearing. It brings out the color of your eyes, which looked as blue as the sky that day. But then, they always remind me of the sky.

Sarah read the letter with a great degree of disbelief. She was, since her last growth spurt, almost as tall as her mother. But if Judy the Elder was statuesque, and Judy the Younger looked like a ballerina, Sarah was just a gawky scarecrow. Still, it sure would be nice if she actually looked like Karl seemed to see her. David had certainly never said anything like this.

I have an appointment with Karl Schmidt in Magdeburg and am hoping that we might get together. I am trying to get him to sell me some steam engines for the LIC, but don’t have a great deal of hope. Do you have any influence with Heidi Partow? In any case, it makes an excellent excuse to go to Magdeburg to see you. One that even Josef can’t object to.

I’ll be taking the train up on Tuesday and meeting with Herr Schmidt on Wednesday. So, could we meet Tuesday evening? Or Wednesday, or wonder of wonders, both?

Sarah found herself wondering if Prince Karl was interested in her or just her connections. And that was weird. Prince Karl was a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. About as noble as it got in Europe. At least, that’s how it seemed to Sarah. He already had connections. It was weird, but it was, by now in Sarah’s world, a fairly commonplace weirdness. In her job, she regularly dealt with Graf this and Prince that. In spite of which, she wasn’t at all sure that she would ever get used to it.

That would make the trip wholly worthwhile, whether Herr Schmidt sees me or not.

Sarah considered. She still wasn’t sure but the only way to find out was to see him. On the other hand, she had no intention of pressuring Karl Schmidt to sell the LIC any engines.

Wendell Household, Magdeburg

On Tuesday, Karl’s riverboat was delayed so he didn’t reach Magdeburg until late. Rather than make Sarah wait for him, he presented himself at the Wendell house, which was a nice townhouse in the richer part of OldStadt. Magdeburg was no longer the burned out wreck that it had been even before the sack. It was a boom town and a town of heavy industry.

He was met by a maid and shown into a sitting room, where Fletcher Wendell was waiting for him. “Have a seat, Karl. Sarah will be down in a few minutes. We heard that the boat was late again, and assumed that you would be delayed.”

“I came directly from the docks, Mr. Secretary,” Karl said, taking the seat Fletcher indicated.

There was an awkward pause. Then Herr Wendell said, “I understand you are courting my daughter. Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

“Honestly? No, probably not. Certainly, my uncles would be unlikely to approve. A point that Josef has made several times. However, the world has changed due to the Ring of Fire. There is a song by Cole Porter. . ‘wrong’s right today, black’s white today, up’s down today. . ’”

“‘Anything goes.’ But so far as my daughter is concerned, be aware, Prince Liechtenstein, that anything most definitely does not go.”

“That’s not what I meant, sir.”

It was, of course, just then that Sarah walked in. “Dad, I’m eighteen.”

Karl stood up and turned to Sarah.

“Eighteen or eighty, you’re still my daughter,” said Fletcher Wendell. “Know this, Karl, prince or not, if you hurt her, you’re going to regret it.”

Karl turned back to Fletcher. “That wasn’t what I meant, Herr Wendell,” he said a little stiffly. “It wasn’t the ‘anything goes’ part. It was the ‘wrong’s right’ part that stuck with me. Religious toleration, for instance. Very much wrong according to the Edict of Restitution and the Counter Reformation. But very much right according to the Constitution of the up-time U.S., the New U.S., the State of Thuringia-Franconia, and even the USE. We are having to unlearn a lot, all of us down-timers. My grandfather was a Lutheran, did you know that? My father and uncles converted to the Catholic faith. My father told me that his conversion was political, his ticket into the upper nobility. But Uncle Gundaker wrote an article about his reasons for converting to Catholicism and those reasons weren’t political.”

“So your father was Lutheran in his heart?” Sarah asked.

“No. He was a doubter,” Karl told her. “He believed in something that had created the universe, but he said to me ‘I don’t believe any of them, priest, pastor or rabbi when they claim to speak for him.’ And I suspect that Uncle Maximillian is more like my father was than like Uncle Gundaker. But Uncle Gundaker has the zeal of a convert.”

“You think that your uncle will object?”

“Yes. In fact, I am virtually certain of it. Which wouldn’t matter at all, except that the treaty of 1606 requires that the head of House Liechtenstein be Catholic, and Uncle Gundaker might be able to make something of that. Yet now we have the Ring of Fire. The pope has named Father Mazzare a cardinal. A Protestant saved the pope from an assassination attempt. And the world of faith is turning backwards somersaults in attempts to make it fit into our various doctrines. I don’t know how it’s all going to work out. I don’t think anyone does. But I will follow my heart, and my heart leads to Sarah.”

“Why do I suddenly feel like Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” Fletcher complained.

“I don’t know,” said Judy the Elder, who had walked in during Karl’s speech, “because you’re acting more like Sidney Poitier’s father. Or at least the situation is a lot more along the lines of Sarah being in the Sidney Poitier role.” She turned to look at Sarah. “Not that your dad is totally off the mark, dear. If you and Karl should marry, there are going to be a whole lot of people that are deeply offended, no matter how successful and competent you are. Either because you’re not Catholic or because you’re not a noble.”

“First of all, you’re all way ahead of yourselves. We’re barely dating yet. Second. .” Sarah planted her feet and crossed her arms. “. . screw them if they don’t like it. I am not prepared to kiss any royal backsides. No one is better than me because of who their parents were.”

Karl smiled and walked over to Sarah. “I quite agree,” he said, “Especially to the part about no one being better than you.

“You know the town better than I do these days, Sarah. So where are we going tonight?”

Schmidt Steamworks, Magdeburg

The next day’s meeting with Karl Schmidt didn’t go well. Schmidt was apologetic, but firm. He simply didn’t have any more capacity to pull out of his factory, not for any price, and all his present capacity was committed.

“What about adding capacity?” Prince Karl asked.

“New machines from Grantville? I’ve already ordered them. I’m on Dave Marcantonio’s waiting list, and even the fact that he owns something like five percent of Schmidt Steam isn’t moving us up on the list.”

“I’m starting to think that between them, Dave Marcantonio and Ollie Reardon own five percent of the whole world,” Prince Karl complained.

“No. Only the USE.” Karl Schmidt laughed.

Prince Karl joined in the laughter, then said, “Well, at least it gives me an excuse to come back to Magdeburg to try to persuade you.”

“Why would you want to come back to Magdeburg?”

There was a very unladylike snort from the other end if the room. Both Karls looked over and Heidi Partow said, “He’s got a thing for Sarah Wendell.”

Karl Schmidt glanced back at Prince Karl, who was turning a not overly becoming shade of red and said, “I sympathise, Your Serene Highness.” Then, looking right at Heidi, added, “Up-timer girls can drive you crazy.”

Fleischer’s Steak House, Magdeburg

“Well, Sarah, you have a prince on your string for sure,” Heidi Partow told Sarah a few days later. “He’s actually in a hurry to come back to smoky, dirty, Magdeburg just to see you.”

“I don’t know, Heidi.” Sarah jabbed a cherry tomato from her salad. She had been surprised when the Partow’s older sister had arranged to have lunch with her. Now the reason was coming clear. “I think he may be trying to get a connection into the Grantville power structure.”

“Naw. If that were it, he’d be going after one of the Catholic girls in town. Well, maybe a little bit. Your dad’s pretty high in the Stearns administration. So, I guess rank could trump religion, but he was blushing enough when I teased him about it. I figure that means that it’s mostly you, not your position.” Heidi blinked. “Hey, that might make you the top of the list. We have girls marrying grafs and dukes and stuff. But you might just be first to have an actual prince on your string.”

“Brandy Bates is engaged to Prince Vladimir of Russia,” Sarah said. “And I don’t have Karl on my string. We’ve had a couple of dates, that’s all.”

Hiedi sniffed. “Is Vladimir a prince, or just a grand duke? Besides he’s from Russia.” Heidi sliced off a bit of chicken as though it was all of eastern Europe in one tiny bite. She popped it into her mouth, chewed a couple of times, and it was gone, and all the Russian princes in the world gone with it. “And don’t kid yourself, Sarah. You have him hooked and you can reel him in. . if you don’t blow it.”

“Can we talk about something else? Anything else?”

“Okay. . we’ll talk about my love life. Which is abysmal. . At least you dumped David. Stay away from the dedicated ones. You can never get their noses out of the machines long enough to notice you.”

Over the next hour, Sarah learned that Karl Schmidt was a jerk, but Heidi was determined to catch him anyway. Also about the social relations of the upper middle class to lower upper class of Magdeburg which concentrated on the up-timer connected. And, surprisingly, she had a fairly good time.

By the next week, everyone in Magdeburg knew that Sarah Wendell and Prince Eusebius Karl von Liechtenstein were “an item.”

New Jewish Quarter, outside Vienna

“What is a Sarah Wendell?” Gundaker von Liechtenstein asked.

Moses Abrabanel ignored the phrasing and thought for a moment. They were in the Abrabanel offices outside of Vienna proper. They were here rather than at the palace because Moses was under a political cloud. He had gone to Grantville in late 1631 and had failed to be nearly as adamantly opposed to the up-timers as he should have after they had upset the political and military apple carts of the Holy Roman Empire. Besides, he was Jewish and Ferdinand II might find Jews useful and even necessary, but he didn’t like them. “You know, I think I met her. She is the eldest daughter of Fletcher and Judy Wendell.”

Moses got up and went to a file cabinet. He had seen several in Grantville, and had some made as soon as he got back to Vienna. One whole file cabinet was dedicated to all things Grantville. He selected the third drawer from the left, which included up-timers with last names from U-Z He opened it and found the Wendells. “Yes, here she is. Sarah Wendell. . Oh yes. The sewing machines. She was one of the children with the sewing machine factory.”

Moses returned to his desk, examining the file. “Are you interested in sewing machines?” He flipped over a page “Oh. Someone should have pointed this out to me.” He looked up from the file. “I’m sorry, Prince von Liechtenstein. Someone sent a note about what is going on and it got put in the files, but not brought to my attention.”

Moses looked around the offices trying to find a polite way of phrasing information in the file. “I assume that your interest is due to the fact that Prince Karl and Sarah Wendell are seeing each other socially?”

“You have confirmation of the rumors then?” Gundaker asked. “Is Sarah Wendell anyone important? It wouldn’t be too bad if he had a fling with an unimportant up-timer, though it still shows a disappointing lack of self control.”

Moses looked around the office again. It was no more help than it had been before. “I don’t think that’s the case here. Her father was on the finance subcommittee of the Emergency Committee, the people who wrote the New U.S. Constitution. Just a moment.” Moses went back to his desk and got another file. “Yes, I thought so. Fletcher Wendell, Sarah’s father, is the Secretary of the Treasury for the USE. Essentially the same post that you hold in the Empire.”

“I thought that was someone called Coleman Walker?”

“No, he is the head of their Federal Reserve Bank.” Moses shrugged. “There is no good analogy to the Federal Reserve Bank in the Empire.” It wasn’t the partly government, partly private nature of the Fed that would be hard to explain to Gundaker von Liechtenstein. It was things like the limits on the infinite checkbook. Those things were hard enough for Moses to follow and he had been to Grantville and met the people. Anyway, that was all beside the point so far as Gundaker von Liechtenstein was concerned. “You know that they do not draw the lines of nobility the same way we do. This is not as concrete as I would prefer, but I would have to place the whole family in the upper echelons of the up-timers. In the same category as Mike Stearns, Ed Piazza or Julie Sims.”

“Well, Karl can’t be thinking about marrying the girl. Is she one of those up-timer pseudo-Catholics like that Father Mazzare?”

Moses blinked. Cardinal Larry Mazzare had been approved by the pope, but it was hardly a Jew’s place to be telling that to a staunch Counter-Reformationist like Gundaker von Liechtenstein. Besides which, Gundaker was a very smart man whose intelligence was only outdistanced by his stubbornness. Instead, Moses looked down at his folder. “No. They are Baptist.”

“What’s that?”

“Apparently it evolved from the Anabaptist, or is related to the Anabaptist. Honestly, Prince Gundaker, I am no expert on the Christian faith.”

“The Anabaptists aren’t Christians. They are heretics!” Gundaker looked at Moses and then, after a moment, waved it off. Moses knew Gundaker’s views, and knew that Gundaker dealt with him as a sort of necessary evil, but was firmly convinced that absent conversion to the true faith of the Catholic church, Moses was going to hell. He also knew that in Gundaker’s world view, Moses, by virtue of being a Jew, deserved to go to hell. Gundaker tolerated Jews because of their usefulness, not out of any love for them or respect for their views. But the prince was still speaking. “I will have to write my nephew and warn him away from the up-timer.”

On the road to Regensburg

“I don’t friggin’ believe this,” Ron Sanderlin said. “This is not a road. It’s not even a path. This is a friggin’ game trail. Deer would find this a hard route.”

The problem was a section of what, in a fit of aggrandizement, was locally called a “road.” It was about four feet wide and consisted of mud impregnated with rocks. And from the size of the rocks, it looked like it was ready to give birth. That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst part were the two trees that were growing closer together than two trees that size ought to be capable of.

“Did you happen to bring a chainsaw?” Sonny Fortney asked.

“No. You know how much they’re worth now and most of them haven’t been converted to use alternate fuels. So I sold it.”

“Yep. Me too,” Sonny agreed. “I guess it’s time for axes.”

“What about the stumps?”

“We’ll have to burn the stumps after we take down the trees. But, unless we want to burn the whole grove, we need to take the trees down first.”

“Who owns the trees?” Hayley Fortney asked.

Sonny hooked his thumb at the village they had passed through about five minutes back. “Probably them.”

Even when the road was “good,” they made only about three miles an hour, because of the wagons. And now that they were in the Upper Palatinate, the roads were rarely all that good for all that long. It was a case of “go a little, stop, fix the road, and then go a little more.” For the last eleven miles, they had been doing fairly well and they had passed a village without stopping about two miles back.

Istvan was sitting his horse. “I’ll ride back and ask them.” He turned to one of the mercenaries that were acting as guards. “Conrad, you ride ahead and check at the next village on the road. One of them at least ought to know. Meanwhile, we rest the horses and have an early lunch.”

* * *

The two trees, in fact the whole grove, were part of the village that they had passed. The villagers had the right to gather firewood from the grove, but not the right to chop down whole trees. On the other hand, the villagers were supposed to keep the road in good repair. And that would justify cutting down at least one of the trees, possibly both. The village council was not in any great hurry to settle things-because they were up-timers and, to the locals, something between a circus and a zoo. In spite of the fact that they were getting into harvest time, the village was happy to have them stay as long as it took to make the best profit-er, deal-possible.

By the middle of the afternoon, as Herr Bauer was-for the fourth time-discussing the great, very great, risk that letting the wagon train cut down the trees would be, Sonny could see that Istvan was just about ready to pull his sword and demonstrate the risk they ran by more delays.

“What about Captain Jack?” Brandon Fortney, Hayley’s little brother, piped up.

“What about him?” Sonny asked.

“They have chickens!” Brandon insisted. “But they’re down-time chickens. Captain Jack can improve their stock. That ought to be worth cutting down a couple trees.”

Herr Bauer looked doubtful when approached about the possible solution, then Brandon showed him Captain Jack in the wire mesh cage.

Hayley could see the light of avarice enter the farmer’s eyes. And he immediately started trying to negotiate for the permanent sale of the rooster in exchange for the permission to cut down the trees.

“Forget it, Brandon. They aren’t going to be reasonable,” Hayley said in German. “We’ll have to send a rider to Augsburg and file an official complaint against the village for failure to maintain the road. That’s breach of their rental agreement, and I would imagine that the leaseholder is looking for an excuse to get rid of some of his farmers to replace them with fewer farmers and better plows.”

“Now, now,” Herr Bauer said. “There is no reason to take that attitude. I’m sure we can work something out.”

* * *

They got to cut down the trees and Captain Jack got to party hearty with the local hens for the two days it took. Then the wagon train made fairly good time. . till the next impediment.